Deleted Gemini Chats Can Stay With Google Reviewers for Up to Three Years

TLDR

• Google’s Gemini Apps Privacy Hub says reviewed chats can be kept for up to three years after a user deletes them.
• A GitHub project says an October 16 edit reversed Google’s 2023 pledge that personal Gmail, Docs and Drive content is not seen by human reviewers.
• Gemini Connected Apps changed from opt-in to on by default across Gmail, Chat and Meet.
• A class action, Thele v. Google, claims the default-on setting violates California’s wiretapping law.
• The GitHub author is pseudonymous, and no independent lab has reproduced the reported behavior at scale.

Google users who delete their Gemini chats may not be erasing every copy. The company’s Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, updated on October 13, 2026, says reviewed conversations can be kept for up to three years after deletion.

The rule applies to personal accounts with Keep Activity turned on. A subset of those chats is read by human reviewers, including outside service providers.

The disclosure is drawing attention because of a separate change to how Gemini links to Gmail, Drive and other Google apps. Critics say the two changes together put personal email and files within reach of reviewers.

What Changed in Google’s Policy

In 2023, Google said personal content from Gmail, Docs and Drive “is not seen by human reviewers.” A GitHub documentation project says an October 16 edit to a Google help article reversed that pledge.

According to the project, connected Drive and email content now flows into human review pipelines. Google also switched Gemini Connected Apps from opt-in to on by default across Gmail, Chat and Meet.

That means users who never turned the feature on may already be covered. Google now warns users against connecting apps that hold “confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.”

The change has also reached the courts. A class action, Thele v. Google, argues the default-on activation violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act, a state wiretapping law.

How the Retrieval Works

The GitHub project is titled “Documentation of Gemini File Leaking Behavior.” Its author says Gemini pulls data “autonomously in background conversation without explicit @Drive or @Gmail tags.”

The author also describes the behavior as probabilistic. The same question can return different data from one session to the next, which makes it hard to track what was exposed.

The project lists four possible outcomes. A query may return nothing, a short metadata summary, or a “2–4 sentence exact quotation” containing “sensitive PII, account details.”

In the fourth outcome, the “complete, unredacted text” of a document enters the chat. That content could then become part of a conversation selected for review.

The suggested test is simple. A user with an internet bill in a connected Gmail account casually mentions they may be paying too much for internet service.

The author also questions Google’s privacy filters. The project says Google’s regex and named entity recognition scrubbers “cannot sufficiently deidentify narrative data.”

The issue reaches into the workplace as well. About 67% of people using corporate devices run personal Google accounts on them, and a Workspace license does not close that gap after the fact.

The three-year retention window is longer than most corporate data retention policies. It is also longer than the periods used by competing AI providers, according to the report.

The GitHub author is pseudonymous. No independent lab has yet published a reproduction of the four-outcome behavior at scale.

The post Deleted Gemini Chats Can Stay With Google Reviewers for Up to Three Years appeared first on Blockonomi.